Fitbit story of how it came to be on How I built that. Fun listen about the start of a big brand that got clobbered by the Apple Watch.
Product Strategy from the Rework podcast. Always interesting to hear how people design and build things. One take away for me here is setting hard time frames for a product and if it isn’t working by the deadline evaluating if it should be continued or not. Hard to do but critical for success in creating profitable products and services.
Watching:
Workout Details:
Bodyweight routine as on Monday. Feeling pretty good about things with this workout. My main focus is getting my pull-up to 3 sets of 8 reps by the end of July. I have a ways to go but its been a goal for a few years now and I just need to commit to it and make it happen.
Its another beautiful day here in Colorado. Hoping its nice in your area too!
One of the first things my dad did when I got into racing bikes was make me learn how to maintain my bike. He did it out of necessity as bike shops are expensive but it was also a great way to get me to show my commitment. I am not a great mechanic but I can fix a lot of things on a bike. One thing that is always fun is putting better equipment on your bike:
Workout details:
Straight forward workout today: ride for 1.5 hours around level 2 heart rate. So I took a left out the driveway and went for 11 miles and then turned around and came home.
Had the regular North West headwind going out, with a nice push back home. People often ask if I am afraid on the country roads around here. There are a lot of large pickup trucks, dump trucks, cement trucks, and semi trailers driving around. The interesting thing is that those vehicles either go across the double yellow lines to give me space, or slow down so when passing me. They are great people and maybe 1 in 50 is kinda a jerk.
Its not as peaceful as riding somewhere more remote or on a trail in the forest, but I can ride from my door to hundreds of miles in each direction. It makes it easy to decide to get a workout as well. I just get on my bike and go.
Its a day off today. Well not from working-out but from working. Since we moved back to Colorado over the weekend it seemed like taking an extra day to settle in is a nice touch. Plus there is a lot of work to do on the land, and family and friends to visit (from a distance).
Workout Details:
We are back to Monday strength day, and for this workout I have decided to go back to an old favorite: The 2017 Reddit Recommended Routine. It is important to note the year as the routine has been updated, but the new format requires additional equipment which I don’t want to deal with. I have done this routine off and on for a number of years. It is a great way to hit the entire body quickly and intelligently for strength gains.
Since I live in an RV full-time, workout equipment is at a premium for space and weight. This means that body-weight exercises are going to be the focus. The only equipment needed is a pull-up bar, rings, a mat (optional if you like being in the dirt or rocks), and box (optional). With that equipment I can cover pull and push exercises. Then I have squats, L-sits, and core exercises to cover the rest.
Today’s workout was good. I have not done it in a few weeks so I kept the reps on the lower end. My pull up still is more of a let down which sounds negative, but only because those are the exercise I am doing in the progression. 🤪
Ok enough for today. Have a great one and see you manana!
Happy Sunday indeed. We got the trailer back up to Colorado no problem and have already gone for a bike ride. The dogs have run the yard a few times and the sun is setting. Its been a fun few months getting back here but now we are stationary till Fall and maybe longer. Probably longer.
I finished listening to The Great Influenza on the drive and I highly recommend it. Its a historical accounting of the 1918 pandemic from a medical perspective with a focus on the United States. It reads less like history and more like current events. On the plus side: we have been here before. On the not so plus side: we are making the same mistakes again.
Workout Details:
Today was the last day of the recovery week. We did a 2 hour easy ride. This is supposed to be on a flat course but there isn’t much flat in Mancos. I always start heading left out of the driveway for 2 reasons: 1) Start uphill so you finish downhill and 2) Its usually into the wind so you get the wind at your back coming home.
Last day in Tubac before the two day drive to Mancos Colorado where we will spend the summer. It’s getting hot here in southern Arizona and after spending 17 years in Phoenix I’m all set for 95+ days.
I listened to a few podcasts on today’s 2 hour ride. The one I really enjoyed was the Ted Radio Hour titled Meditations on Loneliness. It had a few stories from various perspectives about how loneliness affects us and how we can cope. I enjoyed the one about the family taking on a 100 day challenge for a few reasons. The one on the CoLiving space was also fascinating.
I’ve read a few articles discussing that remote workers suffer from loneliness more than their office dwelling brethren and it seems obvious to me for a few reasons. Clearly the physical interaction of an office creates more intimate and spontaneous conversations and interactions. Is it possible to recreate some of this in digital environment?
Workout details:
2 hour ride in your level 2 heart rate zone. We are still in a recovery week so the rides are a little shorter and easier this weekend. This is basically a low effort ride aimed at cardio training and keeping the muscles moving. If you don’t have a heart rate monitor it’s a ride that is you sweating a little bit you could easily carry on a conversation the whole time.
I rode south further than I have before and took a left up a steep hill into a neighborhood. It was a great ride and got me prepared for spending 7 hours driving.
Happy Friday! Tomorrow we drive the trailer north to our land in Southwest Colorado. Getting pretty excited about that. Tomorrow we will drive about 6.5 hours to Cameron AZ just north of Flagstaff. Its a trading post/gas station town near the east entrance to the Grand Canyon.
We have stopped there a few times over the years as its about halfway between where our land is and Phoenix. While there is an RV park to stay at it is horribly unlevel and a little small for our 30 foot travel trailer.
The owners actually recommended that we just park in an overflow lot a few years ago. So that is what we do everytime. Its not totally level but we park so that our heads are higher than our feet when sleeping and its good for one night.
Workout Details:
Today is a 30 min Core workout and a 30 min easy ride. For the Core I have a 20 minute Ab routine on Audible that makes me wimper and cry only a few times. That’s how you know its good. 😂
I survived and then did a 10 minute Yoga routine that was nice and relaxing.
The ride will happen after work and will be nice and easy.
It was a beautiful ride this morning. Temperature was comfortable and pretty much no wind or clouds in sight. I was able to sneak out without waking the dogs up but was still able to make my cup of joe.
We will be leaving Tubac on Saturday and I will miss this sleepy little town. The RV park we have been staying at is anything but a normal RV park. It is much closer to a hippie commune with irregularly placed camping sites and bird feeders liberally placed throughout. The nearby roads are a bit rough but quiet and with enough varying grades to build nice workouts around.
Today’s Workout Details:
One of the challenges for mountain biking over road cycling is that the terrain is widely varying. Besides a lot of ups and downs there are also varying sizes of rocks, roots, and other obstacles to rode over. This requires short bursts of intense power to ride through smoothly.
To train for this type of riding regular intervals are not enough. While intervals help raise your ability to ride with a sustained heart rate or power they don’t necessarily help build the specific strength needed to have short bursts of power.
Enter the force reps workout. While similar to an interval workout force reps are more similar to weight lifting where a short burst of energy is used to move something heavy. In this case the short burst is 10 pedal strokes and the heavy thing is being in a large gear.
During the early 2000’s when Lance Armstrong was dominating the Tour de France and making cycling popular I remember my cousin teasing me that he was doping. I was completely and willfully blinded by the comeback story and the amazing feats to riding.
Once it came out that he was a cheat I was devastated and I still don’t look the same at professional cycling.
In 2014 a documentary was made called Rough Rider about Paul Kimmage a former pro cyclist who had written about doping in 1990. Its an interesting documentary as it covers multiple decades of the problem with doping in cycling. It also presents an emotional story of Paul’s tenuous relationship with a sport that he loves and reviles.
Heyo! Happy hump day and lets get right into the strength training day.
Before I started this current 12 week cycling training program I was pretty consistently doing a 3 day a week bodyweight training program. I have a love then not so love relationship with strength training in general. I love that it makes me stronger and gets me to work on muscle groups that riding a bike doesn’t necessarily work. The not so love part comes in cause when I am doing strength training it means I am not riding my bike.
Lately I have been using some Yoga and Core workouts included with my Audible subscription to help me do parts of the strength workouts. Part of this is because the cycling training program I am on doesn’t exactly give me a detailed workout plan. Its more of guidelines of what exercises to do. The other part is that having a recording explicitly tell me to do crunches and pushups and mountain climbers and other movements that I don’t like to do, helps get me to do them.
Today I started off with a 20 minute Yoga warm up to get things going and then did two 10 minute Ab/Core workouts that were really hard. On one hand it is really good to be pushed to the limit as it helps you understand where you can improve. On the other hand it can be a little demotivating to totally get your butt kicked and not be able to complete every movement as instructed.
In the end I know that each minute I put into the strength work will come back as more comfort and endurance on the bike. 😘
As someone over the age of 40 it is important to focus on recovery as much as if not more than my hard workouts. If you are over 40 you should understand the why of this. If you are not yet 40 then get ready. 😂
Snoozing Dogs
As we age our bodies get slower and not as good at recovering from injuries. Exercise is in effect a mild form of injury. In order to grow muscle you have to push it to its limits and cause small tears in the muscle fibers. The muscle repairs itself and overcompensates to make itself stronger than it was before the exercise.
If you don’t give the muscle enough time to repair then you make no progress in gaining strength. If you do this often enough you can achieve something known as over training. Generally the rule of thumb for endurance training is 3 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.
I say generally as this is applied to athletes in their 20’s and up broadly, but if we circle back a few paragraphs we see that as we age our ability to recover gets worse. To compensate for this the training program I am currently following does 2 weeks of progressive overload followed by 1 week of recovery.
That was a long way of saying that this week is my week of recovery. 😎
Today I had a 1 hour recovery ride which means I pedaled about as easy as I could without falling over for 1 hour on a flat road. My heart rate stayed in Zone/Level 1 and I could have easily held a conversation for the entire ride.
It was a beautiful morning with a light southerly breeze. Riding around Tubac for the last 5 weeks has been really nice and I will miss it, a little. The roads here are not in the greatest of conditions and there isn’t a lot of shoulder. The nice thing is that the drivers have pretty much all given be a wide berth which is always appreciated.
I listened to a number of podcasts this morning:
ReWork – The Soul of an Entrepreneur – Great discussion about entrepreneurs from an angle that is less typical these days. Turns out we don’t all have to be Elon Musk or a Kardashian to be successful.
Short Wave – On Earth Day, What You Can Do For The Environment – 50th Anniversary of Earth Day is tomorrow. 3 things to focus on: 1) Educate yourself, 2) Make conscious purchase decisions, and 3) Reduce travel. While individually we might not make a huge impact on climate change we will change our thinking and perspective. This will then force our representatives to adopt our thinking and perspective. Maybe.
